Recorded Talks by Zhen Dao

This uncut and spontaneous interview of Zhen Dao was conducted by Felice Nguyen and Eve Bradford, and filmed by Brian Roberts and Koa Kalish, on January 6th, 2020, at the MogaDao Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This interview was intended to comprise only “rough material” for the creation of an artistic, short documentary on the practice tradition of MogaDao, and the philosophy of Post-Daoism. This documentary is forthcoming, however, because of a certain comprehensiveness that chance seemed to lend to this spontaneous interview, the decision was made to publish this footage untouched by editing, as it represents, rather remarkably, not only the arc of the tradition itself, but also the natural atmosphere of the MogaDao Institute.

In this most personal of presentations, Zhen Dao speaks about her mythopoetic journey as a transgender woman. She also touches on the foundational force of the tradition of MogaDao, and the particular role that trans people play—not to be pitied or even to be upheld as in need of the “master narrative’s” compassion, but rather as necessary for that very master narrative’s evolution. For if society might unpack and deconstruct its own repressions—repressions that have thwarted the expression of the variegated soul and caused untold historical suffering and pain—it will be by virtue of turning toward the margins, where forces of truth emerge and create transformation.

Emotion moves us, changes us, visits us and seems to come from “nowhere” and sometimes to disturb what we thought was our “equanimity,” our calm, our sense of control over our lives. In the 21stcentury, our lives seem more out of control than ever; we feel that we are not so much living as being lived by forces outside of ourselves. We feel programmed from without, distracted constantly against our inmost instincts, and prey to massive forces—sociopolitical, consumerist, technological—that we cannot control. Therefore we have begun to suspect emotion, and to treat it as something that we must control; we feel that emotion is “bad” for us, something that is deterring us from our right and prescribed course, from our rewards. To Zhen Dao this represents nothing less than a tragic loss of faith in being itself. For emotions—like Daoist conceptions of 5 Element Theory—have patterns which fulfill themselves through faith. Zhen Dao will talk about the spiritual purpose of emotion, in particular the so-called “negative emotions,” for no wind, no weather, no authentic tempest in the human soul can be wrong. Rather, it must be seen (and felt) all the way through to its magnificence, that is to say its value and significance for a whole life—and for all of being that touches and depends on that life. Emotion moves us, changes us, visits us and seems to come from “nowhere” and sometimes to disturb what we thought was our “equanimity,” our calm, our sense of control over our lives. In the 21stcentury, our lives seem more out of control than ever; we feel that we are not so much living as being lived by forces outside of ourselves. We feel programmed from without, distracted constantly against our inmost instincts, and prey to massive forces—sociopolitical, consumerist, technological—that we cannot control. Therefore we have begun to suspect emotion, and to treat it as something that we must control; we feel that emotion is “bad” for us, something that is deterring us from our right and prescribed course, from our rewards. To Zhen Dao this represents nothing less than a tragic loss of faith in being itself. For emotions—like Daoist conceptions of 5 Element Theory—have patterns which fulfill themselves through faith. Zhen Dao will talk about the spiritual purpose of emotion, in particular, the so-called “negative emotions,” for no wind, no weather, no authentic tempest in the human soul can be wrong. Rather, it must be seen (and felt) all the way through to its magnificence, that is to say, its value and significance for a whole life—and for all of being that touches and depends on that life.

In this talk Zhen Dao, the transgender founder of Post-Daoism and a sex-positive sexuality teacher, speaks about the relationship between sexuality and world, defining that intersection as “the erotic.” The erotic, according to Zhen Dao, is never simply intense sexuality performed as a commodity separate from other forms of lived experience. Rather the erotic—the multiplicity of desires both explicit and subtle—is the will to be, to be fully alive, which is often expressed through intense sexuality and desire, but also—and not separate from—our attentiveness to all of life, especially to our relationships and to the natural world, and to the life of the imagination through which power we are able to perceive reality. The whole structure of pornography, Zhen Dao suggests, even so-called “feminist” and “queer” pornography which can mask convincingly as forms of emancipation, is based on corporate models of the body as capital, conscious and unconscious exploitation, and divisions of subjectivity and objectivity that imitate the forces and histories of oppression which true eroticism would help to liberate us from. Zhen Dao is the founder of the practice tradition of MogaDao, and the MogaDao Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, encompassing MogaDao Qigong, MogaDao Yoga, MogaDao Gongfu, Empty Sky Meditation, the Depth Sexology and Erotic Basis of Being Program, and the Heartmind Warrior Training Program (a spiritualized martial arts program and an academic seminar covering art and aesthetics, sociopolitical issues, and spirituality) at the MogaDao Institute, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is also a poet, novelist, and writer on a wide variety of religious, philosophical, and cultural subjects, and the director of the theater company SACRA: Immanence Theater, also based in Santa Fe, NM.

In this talk, given at the MogaDao Institute in Santa Fe, NM on January 5, 2018, Zhen Dao discusses her philosophy of the “True Yang” and the “True Yin,” which are original conceptions of these Daoist essences, and central to the ideology of the practice tradition and Post-Daoist philosophy of MogaDao. The central theme of the talk is the way in which the prevailing culture’s limited definitions of gender and sexuality—the binarism of our culture—might contribute to pathologies of sexual predation. Zhen Dao also addresses the “inherited mythologies” of the West, and how these mythologies—consciously or not—serve to destroy or “cleanse” the chthonic energies (the primal forces) of the Earth and of human bodies. This “Chthonic Cleansing,” Zhen Dao’s term for the destruction of the chthonic through inherited mythologies, serves to widen the gulf of “otherness” between the genders, an estrangement that not only leads to sexual invasion and predation, but also diminishes the magnificent width of human being—a width that is stymied by reductive definitions of sex and gender. ~ Zhen Dao is the intersex transgender founder of the practice tradition of MogaDao, encompassing MogaDao Qigong, MogaDao Yoga, MogaDao Gongfu, Empty Sky Meditation, and Depth Sexology, and the Heartmind Warrior Training Program at the MogaDao Institute. She is also a poet, novelist, and writer on a wide variety of religious, philosophical, and cultural subjects, and the director of the theater company SACRA: Immanence Theater. Before founding MogaDao, she was a professor of Literature, and a farrier and horse trainer. She has been a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and her first novel was published by Penguin Books. For more information please visit: http://www.mogadaoinstitute.com